It is very instructive to compare the foregoing sketch of Dr. Hort’s system, brief and inadequate, yet not we trust unfair, as it is, with the theory of Griesbach, for whose labours and genius we share much of his successor’s veneration. As regards the modification of text called Western their views are nearly identical, only that Griesbach was necessarily ignorant of such important constituents of it as the Curetonian Syriac and the Old Latin codices which have come to light since his day, and thus was exempted from the temptation to which Dr. Hort has unhappily yielded, of believing that Codd. אB, with all their comparative purity, represent a primitive text already corrupted by certain accretions from which the Western copies were free (_see_ below, p. 299 and note 1): a violent supposition which seriously impairs the homogeneousness and self-consistency of his whole argument (Hort, pp. 175-6). Griesbach’s Alexandrian class includes not only that which Dr. Hort understands by the name, but the later critic’s _Neutral_ class also, which indeed we fail to distinguish from the other by any marked peculiar characteristics. The more mixed text which Griesbach called Constantinopolitan, and which is represented by Cod. A in the Gospels, in part by Cod. C, the Latin Vulgate, and later authorities, differs from Dr. Hort’s Syrian in much more than name. Wider and deeper researches have made it evident that Griesbach’s notion of a gradual modernizing of the text used from the fourth century downwards in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, would not adequately account for the phenomena wherewith we have to deal. The general, almost universal, prevalence of such a departure from the readings of אB, met with in ecclesiastical writers at least as early in date as the parchment of those manuscripts themselves, can be explained by nothing less than a comprehensive, deliberate, authoritative recension of the sacred books, undertaken by the chief rulers of the Antiochene Church, accepted throughout that great Patriarchate, yet, in spite of all this, never noticed even in the way of passing reference by writers of any description from that period onwards, until its consequences, not its process, became known to eminent critics in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Nothing less than the exigency of his case could have driven our author to encumber himself with a scheme fraught with difficulties too great even for his skill to overcome.